“A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.” Maya Angelou, American poet, b.1928

MY RESERVOIR

When the wheels get stuck I need a robust bout of swift walking until I have pushed the creative gear in forward motion again. When that happens, I head for the reservoir in Central Park. It’s been around for a while. Construction on the reservoir was completed by 1862. Officially named the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir in 1994, it is surrounded by a well-tended running path. After a good rainy downpour Conservancy employees are on the track, rolling the excess from the path. I’m lucky enough to live so close to this patch of positive ions that in a few moments I am circling the watery duck haven and jogging the body and the mind.

Inadvertently memory is jogged as well. I am once again a majorette from blue-collar Astoria in a short red skirt, white satin blouse and gold cummerbund, high stepping in white cowboy boots and twirling my baton ahead of my dad’s drum and bugle corps, The Saints, in one of many parades we marched in Manhattan. We majorettes were known as The Angels. I know, I know. Project girls? Not even close. I remember thinking as we marched under the windows of the no doubt affluent and irritated Fifth Avenue residents that someday I would live near this park. And I do.

Earlier in the day I had joined the queue-with-no-end-in-sight at the post office. On my way I passed the Starbucks on Third Avenue, scene of a pipe bomb explosion the night before. Already the shattered storefront windows had been replaced. The FBI was parked outside, presumably on the lookout for political terrorists. Frankly I think blame might just as easily be laid on any one of their over-caffeinated customers. Have you ever tried that stuff? Better to take a caffeine addiction downtown to the Mud Spot—either the charming hippy throwback café on East 9th Street or wherever their bright orange truck is parked. Look for the peace flag on the side of the truck parked at Astor Place and join the like-minded queue. Really. Raise the two-finger salute for peace and drink their coffee.

Prepared for the interminable wait at the post office, I had my head buried in Virginia Woolf’s novel “Night and Day” until a friend in the neighborhood quietly interrupted me. John is a soft-spoken Englishman who follows Zen Buddhism and birds. I have been invited to the Chogye International Zen Center and am always pleasantly surprised to be greeted there by John, transformed from street clothes into the traditional robes of the teacher. He looked rather tired that morning, explained by a dawn bird walk in Central Park. He had also just returned from Michigan on a successful quest to see one of the rarest birds in the world, Kirkland’s Warbler. Usually the winged warblers will be found wintering like some humans in the Bahamas. Then they (the birds not the humans) fly off to Michigan, not for the newest automobile off the assembly lines (for as long as that lasts in the U.S.) but to nest in the young branches of Jack Pines. The return of the tiny bird’s gurgle is celebrated in Roscommon Michigan with its own Warbler Parade!

The reservoir served as one of the Manhattan locations in the 1976 film, “Marathon Man” where a depressing chain link fence bordered the running track since 1926 and towered well above eye-level. Once a birthday present from friends was to lift me fully clear of the fence for an unobstructed view of the Manhattan skyline at night. The famous scene in the film—a sadistic ex-Nazi dentist with a drill—is the kind of torture that is well known to me. I experienced not so long ago a pleasant enough periodentist with a less than deft touch which, sorry to say, not only tortured me but left a perfectly healthy tooth compromised. I strode past the pump house along the south end of the reservoir, not so much the lead in “Marathon Man” and more like one of the vast extras in “Crappy Union Dental Plan Woman.”

The film was made at a time when one could truly ask about a night time walk in the park or run at the reservoir: “Is it safe?” I’m a native New Yorker and by virtue of that appellation was rather fearless…or stupid. Impatient, as always, I often hurtled through the north end of the park from the west side late at night when the crosstown bus was nowhere to be seen. In the summer I ran around the reservoir after nightfall. It was the best time. Quiet in a way that made one think the dense darkness was rife with luminous faeries if the imagination darted past the obvious glow of fireflies. 

On the running track I scope out the array of ducks, sea gulls, and cormorants sailing blithely under an overcast sky of a late afternoon. It was a good time to be out. Early morning draws the testosterone-driven, gearing up for a workday. Stabby runners are too much to deal with most mornings.

Now there is a cast-iron ornamental fence around the reservoir, closely resembling the original. The upside, of course, is opened up vistas, where once it felt like you were circling a protected Superfund site. The downside—for me—is the swell of tourists, which seems to grow larger every year. There are the unfocused tourists who can’t read universal signs prohibiting bicycles from the track to contend with but a cloudy day usually drives them indoors, leaving a relatively empty running path. For the few tourists around I feel compelled (sometimes) to direct them to the north end of the reservoir for the spectacular perspective on Manhattan’s skyline. French, English, Italian, Asian couples all have the same request, delivered in the same manner: digital camera raised to me as I approach and the moving finger to indicate camera, two people, picture please? “You are a professional, no?” No, I tell them. My camera may look professional but I am not. I prove that by fumbling stupidly with the tiny point-and-shoot handed to me.

Bird watchers can be spotted now and again hunkered on the path, stalking a particular bird. There are nearly 200 species to look out for. The website for the Central Park Conservancy states there are “…five different species of gulls and over 20 species of waterfowl, grebes, cormorants, and loons.” I am presuming they mean birdy loons and not the human kind. There are more than 20 varieties of the human loon.

The aptly named Chris Bird, who is a zoologist at the University of Cambridge and a leading researcher of the Rook has determined that these big black birds that populate the English countryside rival the chimp in intelligence. Among other cerebral feats they can fashion hooks out of wire! Intelligent in a Rook; dangerous left to a New York City pigeon who’d just as soon hot wire a car.

I have my favorites of the birds. The cormorants. When I run with The Mister we always exclaim, “There they are!” Alone and shouting the same thing, I would certainly be thought of as one of those loons. We are always entertained by the group of them on the roof of the pump house at the north end, crowding together like a club of grumpy old men, beaks flapping, making pithy observations on the humans below, I’m sure. There was a swan sighted in early spring and I kept an eye out for it to return with a mate. And it did. But my excitement was short-lived as the couple left again, this time for good. One or the other partner was probably looking for more security, less view. Then once I stood with The Mister at the top of the reservoir and followed a mere speck in the late afternoon sky until it was a red-tailed hawk , coming straight for me, soaring just above my head.

It was a fine thing, being here on the running track, skirting around the duck couple who perambulate daily on the track, oblivious or uncaring about the thunder of runner’s feet flying by them giving the ducks wide berth. I didn’t need to be thinking about the news of the day. Rather than dwelling on Obama’s appointment for Supreme Court Justice and the fact that the Right will do their red-faced and shouty bit and look even stupider and whiter than they already are I can pause momentarily—or for as long as I like—and watch the turtles poke their snouts above the water's surface along the shoreline. I shook the unpleasant news that scientists had created a green-glowing monkey who passed along the gene to its offspring, making it easier to produce animals “…with versions of human disease for medical research.”

On the east side of the reservoir there is a boulder with a bronze plaque that reads: These cherry trees presented to the City of New York in memory of Otto Marx 1870-1963. I can’t find him in Land ’O Google. Maybe he was just a man. A kind man who deserved a grove of cherry trees named in his honor. That would be enough for me.